Dynamic Benchmarking of Building Strategies for a Circular Economy

Increasing building demands from a growing world population puts enormous pressure on natural resources. Management of resource consumption and environmental impacts is therefore vital to secure contemporary and future well-being and progress. Circular Economy (CE) is perceived as an industrial economy model potentially minimizing resource consumption, waste production and environmental impacts by the means of increased material circularity e.g. reuse. In order to promote CE in buildings, there is a need for benchmarks to support building designers in choosing environmentally viable solutions. Although life cycle assessment (LCA) help policy makers and building practitioners to define such benchmarks, benchmark studies often rely on static LCA approaches. Hence, uncertain and unknown dynamic changes during a buildings' long service life influencing the performance of long term sustainable building design principles are not accounted for. Through a literature review the paper at hand identified dynamic technological progress such as resource and energy consumption, energy grid mix, waste management, design and innovation and production efficiency as potentially essential to include when defining realistic CE building strategy benchmarks. How these dynamic factors may affect LCA results were demonstrated through a case study of a concrete column based on a range of possible scenarios. This included estimated future projections and the uncertainty relating to prospective assessments resulting in an output in the form of a span of possible future developments and environmental impacts instead of a single output. Based on the literature review and case study, main challenges of incorporating dynamism within building LCA benchmarking were identified.